Victor Koulbak at Didier Aaron

60 new works in silverpoint by the Russian artist are on display through May 2013

Though Victor Koulbak's paintings and drawings currently on display at New York's Didier Aaron Gallery are recent, an uninformed visitor might easily assume they're from a bygone era. Koulbak's medium of choice, silverpoint—a method more widespread in Michelangelo's time than in 1975, when Koulbak left the USSR for Paris—involves drawing with a thin, silver-metal wire that leaves tiny, light-reflecting particles on paper. "The form emerges gradual, as though floating in space, because the reflections fuddle out perceptions," explains Koulbak, who also takes a page from the Old Masters' book by preparing his papers and canvases with spatulas and knives like those used by great artists of the past.

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His techniques make for beautifully haunting portraits of animals and people, with a depth that can only truly be appreciated in person. Though that's as much Koulbak's doing as the Renaissance era tools he uses. As His Royal Highness, Prince Charles, writes in the accompanying catalog, "His abiding belief that beauty is a manifestation of God confers on his work an almost sacred dimension that renders it beyond fashion and beyond the confines of time."